Thoughts on digitization & libraries while working on Hardin MD

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France & Google Books: Am I Reading the Same Article?

I’ve blogged before about the almost universally negative opinion of Google Books on the blogosphere/twittersphere — I found another notable example last week. On Dec 14, there appeared in NY Times a 12 paragraph article France to Digitize Its Own Literary Works, about President Sarkozy pledging $1.1 billion for book scanning. The article mentions that there has been animosity on the part of Sarkozy toward Google, but doesn’t dwell on this.

In paragraphs 5 and 6, Bruno Racine, president of the National Library, who was interviewed by phone for the article, says the project might be done in partnership with Google. I’ve followed the GBS-France story enough in the last several months that this struck me as surprising. I came across the story on Dec 17, 3 days after it was published, so that there were many links to it on Twitter –Searching in Twitter by its title I found 103 tweets — But surprisingly, only 8 of these mentioned Google. And most of these 8 tweets that did mention Google used terms like “slap at Google … in response to Google uproar … in competition with Google.” One Tweeter — @platformlead – to her credit! – did say “… with Google?”

What’s going on people! Surely more than one of the 103 people who tweeted this article must have seen the mention of a possible partnership with Google. Makes me think people see what they’re looking for. There’s been so much talk about French negativity toward GBS that maybe people just DON’T NOTICE something that shows another side.

Library Journal, to their credit, in this Dec 15 article reporting on the NYT article, did make prominent note in subtitle : “Google might still be a partner, says head of national library” …

Surely someone will notice this in Twitter, I think. But, no, the same blindness continues — Searching in Twitter for the title of this article, I find that only seven people tweeted it. And only one @bcbiupr, mentioned the possible partnership with Google.